The present invention provides an improvement to lightweight, easily handled safety barriers. Barriers of this sort are commonly erected around swimming pools to save small children from accidental drowning. A description of such a barrier is found in Fish's U.S. Pat. No. 4,380,327, the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference.
Prior art swimming pool safety barriers are commonly stretched-panel fences with flexible, lightweight panels (e.g., of woven nylon mesh with top and bottom reinforcing ropes) clamped to poles slid into mounting receptacles. The receptacles (which are commonly made by pounding a cylindrical plastic sleeve into a nominally cylindrical hole drilled in a concrete pool deck) are installed slightly further apart than the nominal distance between poles. Thus, a panel must be stretched slightly to insert its poles into their receptacles. It is also common practice to make tilted receptacles at curved portions of the barrier. A pole inserted into a tilted receptacle initially slants outward from the swimming pool, but deforms slightly into a more upright alignment when the panels disposed on either side of it are stretched.
Pool safety barriers erected to keep unsupervised toddlers out of the pool must be easily removed, or opened, so that an adult can use the pool with a minimum of inconvenience. This requirement dictates choices of panel strength and weight, of pole rigidity, etc., for prior art fencing that allow an adult to easily grasp a pole, stretch an attached panel, and lift the pole from its mounting receptacle. Prior art fences are conventionally made in sections two to three meters in length. This allows a pool user to remove, fold, carry, and stow a section of a convenient size.
A shortcoming of prior art barriers is that it may be so easy to lift a pole from a receptacle that a small child can defeat the safety barrier by either opening the gate area or by crawling under the fence. Although a too easily lifted pole may be a consequence of adjacent receptacles being installed too close together, many such situations are unavoidable in prior art fences. For example, poles installed in tilted receptacles at a corner of a pool are usually very difficult to pull out unless one first relaxes the tension on the adjacent panels. Poles that are in the middle of a long straight run of fencing (e.g., as will be encountered along the long edge of a rectangular pool), on the other hand, are much easier to remove.